Looking for a job, English majors?

WEC’s Media & Communications team needs a clever, enthusiastic and hard-working sub-editor to work across a range of projects. Given the changing landscape of publishing, you will think multi-channel: print, web and mobile and be able subedit copy to suit each media.

Duties include: Subbing copy (news, features and marketing leaflets and flyers) arriving from various WEC UK ministries at speed and to tight deadlines, but with accuracy, attention to detail, precision and to a high and consistent standard, while also maintaining the house style and an appropriate tone of voice at all times; Writing eye-catching, snappy and accurate headlines, straps and abstracts/summaries. You will also be required to write the occasional feature.

Lots of expertise required, there…also lots of responsibilities. But…

It’s a missionary organization with the goal of seeing “Christ known, loved and worshipped by the least-evangelised peoples of the world”. That cooled your interest a bit, I bet.

And then there’s this:

This position is non-salaried as all WEC personnel look to God to provide their personal needs.

ALL WEC personnel? Something tells me that there is someone at the top of the organization who is doing just fine right now.

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What’s sad is that there are a lot of christers who will jump at this chance.

I’ve known lots of them who almost had second jobs with their churches as web designers, accountants, real estate management, psychological counselors–people with serious expertise, who were doing the church’s work for free.

Something tells me that there is someone at the top of the organization who is doing just fine right now.

Because God provides. Not by visible manifestation–God’s too shy for that, now (not in the past, but, you know, he changes)–not ravens bringing cash or any such thing, rather at the expense of the “faithful.” It brings blessings to them, though, beyond all material value, so they get the best end of the deal, and the top dog has to settle for mere worldly gain.

I think generally what this means is “part of your job will be going from church to church with your hand out, asking them to support you in this crucially important work for the Lord that you’re doing. Oh, and also send out mailers asking for donations. Lots of mailers. No, you may not use our envelopes or stamps.”

This position is non-salaried as all WEC personnel look to God to provide their personal needs.

There’s an old joke about that, involving catholics, lutherans, and baptists and a collection-plate.

Short form: Father O’Malley says, “well, there’s a percentage of the collection we use for the poor, a percentage for operations, and then 20% goes to the diocese operations fund – which is my expenses and a modest salary.”
Then Pastor Stiller says, “What I do is throw the collection plates down the stairs. Any money that gets to the bottom goes to the poor. The money that stays in the middle goes to my expenses and salary, and the money near the top is used for building maintenance and operations.”
Reverend Smith says “I throw the plate in the air and figure the lord’ll grab what he wants when it’s up there close to him, and everything that he lets go – well that must be intended for me.”

I’d usually remind them that they could call the office any time between 8:15 AM and 4:30 PM Monday through Friday and they’d reach me, and then try to get them to take the cognitive leap to thinking about how I was supposed to pay my rent if I was spending 37.75 hours every week for four years volunteering, but that never seemed to satisfy them.

Like we should be paying biomedical researchers with the $357.92 we raise annually through bake sales and bottle drives because God forbid someone should make a living wage with a minuscule portion of the cash donors trade for tax receipts.

Welfare queens everywhere, I guess.

Still, their concern was not entirely misplaced. There is mismanagement of funds among NFPs, but like is probably the case with WEC International, it’s mostly all at the top.

@Brother Ogvorbis: I think we British seem to be among the least evangelised people in the world. You can join by moving over here, come and join the dreaded “militant secularists” that the papers warn us about.

As for remuneration, are they implying that God gives staff manna from Heaven? Perhaps he pays the rent as part of a housing benefit scheme.

I just had a trawl through the Charity Commission website, and it does seem as though WEC, at least as a registered charity in England and Wales does not have any employees.

Maybe they do all through volunteers. It’s not impossible, especially if there are some rich benefactors behind the scenes.

They “look to God”? What does that mean exactly? They rely on begging?

Historical fun fact: in general, the difference between Christian monks and friars is that, while monks usually live in self-sustaining monasteries, friars take vows of poverty, live in urban friaries, and support themselves through alms.

It’s one thing to spend a couple of hours of week doing the church newsletter or something. My dad mowed the lawn and did the yardwork at the non-profit (not religiously affiliated) where my stepmom worked for years. It was a small place and didn’t require more than maybe 4 hours a week, less than that during winter.

But this sounds like a full-time job, or close to it, a very different thing.

I have in-laws who are missionaries (I know, there are black sheep in every family). Something that I hadn’t realized, for some reason, before they started doing this, is that most (all?) missionaries must raise their own funding. My in-laws spend at least a year out of every seven in the US going from church to church basically begging for support. In the current economic climate it’s taken them much longer than usual. I’ve never quite figured out why if mission work matters so much to God, he makes it so hard–not to mention demeaning–to raise the money. That’s a conversation I’m dying to have with them, but probably never will. We see them very seldom, and have sort of a tacit agreement not to start discussions likely to end in shouting matches and spoil the occasion. We’ve come close a time or two, though.

But I should mention that while they certainly aren’t getting rich, they actually live a better lifestyle in many ways as missionaries than they did as rural schoolteachers in the US. Since they live in a third-world country, their salaries, pretty meager by American standards, allow them to have several part-time servants, and they are provided with a very nice, if simple, house free of charge. And I think the mission organization helps with college tuition for their kids, at least at “approved” institutions. Of course they’ve all had malaria, which offsets things a bit. I don’t know what their retirement provisions are, either. Maybe, like the above, God is expected to provide.

But this sounds like a full-time job, or close to it, a very different thing.

Like I said in my first post, a lot of people in churches all but have second jobs keeping the enterprise going. One of my fellow postal workers–a job notorious for massive amounts of overtime–was her church’s “communications director”. She maintained the website (for free), the monthly newsletter that she wrote 90% of the articles for (for free), wrangled with the printers for the church bulletins, was the media contact, oversaw the mass mailings of literature and other religious-oriented media to parishioners and people their “mission” had contacted–

She was spending 35 hours or more a week doing all that for her church. On top of the 50-60 hours a week she was working at her paying job.

If she’d been working for a corporation, she would have easily been pulling down 80+ K a year–and have more free time!

Speaking as an English major, thank you, no, I already have a very good job that pays me surprisingly well, and doesn’t require the intervention of invisible entities (unless you count my direct supervisor who’s seven time zones away in Jerusalem).

I know a lot of you science types find it hard to believe that anybody with any kind of liberal arts degree could ever have remunerative employ that doesn’t require saying “Do you want fries with that?”, but where do you think all the arts and creative-technical professionals come from anyway?

There’s a school for missionary kids here in Spain, and apparently ALL the teachers are volunteers. They have to arrive with up to €30,000 to finance their 6-12 month stay. It’s supposed to be their ministry. Teaching degree not required.